Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5)

by Diane Vallere

  I looked away from her. I didn’t want her to see that she’d pretty much hit the nail on the head. I’d mistaken time for intimacy. I’d tried to maintain control, with my guidelines and boundaries. Nick had allowed me to have a hand in his business once. He’d let me see the challenges he faced in reclaiming his own label, and he’d even invited me over to meet his dad. But because I was so afraid of what he’d say when he got to know what was under the designer clothes, I hadn’t dropped my guard and let him in.

  “Samantha, I hate to be rude, but it’s time for me to garden. If you have no other pressing questions, I’m going to ask if Mr. Charles will escort you to your car.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said. I thanked her for visiting with me and left. Our time together had been brief but informational. I was eager to talk to Loncar, to find out what he thought about the value of Jennie Mae’s clothes and tell him about the connection between the name Pritchard Smith and her. I didn’t know why he was using that name, but the fact that he was here now, and had been inside her house was creepy. Jennie Mae had been a target long before Nancie had told me about this project.

  I drove back to my house. The dead taxi was parked in the driveway and the broken glass pane on the garage door had been taped over. I braced myself for the inevitable confrontation and rang the doorbell. Loncar answered.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

  “And you are?” I glanced at the empty beer bottle on the coffee table. “What do you think this is, a bed and breakfast?”

  “Ms. Kidd, I’ve heard about your cooking skills, so no, I would hardly mistake this for a bed and breakfast,” he said, emphasizing the last word. It would have been insulting if it wasn’t so accurate. “Get inside.” Once I was in the living room, he shut and locked the door.

  “I was bugged,” I said. “The only things I had with me were my wallet, my phone, a lipstick, and a pen that Pritchard gave me. It had to be the pen. Pritchard knew where I was, he knew who I’d talked to. There was no other way he could have known that Nick was at the Motel 6. Or that you and I swapped rooms. Or that I was driving the dead taxi. Do you see now?”

  “Where’s this pen?”

  “My bag spilled in the parking lot of the motel. I lost everything. Did your team recover anything?” He shook his head. “If you don’t have it, then either he has it or it rolled under somebody’s car. Did you ask the hotel if they had security cameras? Or if anybody reported anything? Did your team find the slugs in the exterior wall?”

  “My team has remained on top of the investigation.”

  “What about my message? Did you go through the trash? Did you find the copy of the ID cards?”

  “Ms. Kidd, where did you find those IDs?”

  “In Pritchard Smith’s briefcase.” I diverted my eyes. “I’m not proud of this, but there was something about him that I didn’t trust from the beginning, and his briefcase was right there in the office, and it wasn’t locked, so I looked. And I was right, right? Four different IDs from four different states. And just now I was at Jennie Mae’s house and she told me—”

  “You went to the Tome house?”

  “You’re not listening to me. She told me that Pritchard Smith was her husband. She thought he left her. But think about it, the guy I work with has a bunch of different identification, and one of them has that name on it. He shows up here. He has to know about the clothes. He goes to her house. Mr. Charles handled the arrangements and I bet my coworker used a different identity so Mr. Charles wouldn’t be suspicious.”

  “Ms. Tome told you all of this?”

  “Yes.”

  Loncar ran his hand over his hair. He looked around the living room, and then faced me again. He pointed both index fingers at me like Isaac from the opening credits of The Love Boat. “I told you to stay out of this.”

  “With all due respect, I tried to stay out of it and Nick’s dad got kidnapped. Do you have an update on that? Has anybody heard from him?”

  “Not yet.” He dropped his hands and balled them up into fists, and then released. If he’d been a cartoon character, smoke would have come out of his ears.

  “Where are you staying tonight?” he asked.

  “I thought I’d stay here.”

  “You’re not staying here.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I could stay with your wife and daughter?” He stepped toward me and I stepped back and held up both hands. “Maybe not.”

  “Wait here,” Loncar said. He pulled his phone from a pocket on his belt and went into the kitchen. A few seconds later, he came back. “I need privacy. Go to your room.”

  “Yes, dad,” I said. I climbed the stairs, went into my bedroom, and slammed the door behind me.

  There was no reason at all why I shouldn’t stay at my own house. Pritchard didn’t know I was there, and even if he did, I had a police detective there to guard me. It should have been the safest place I could be.

  I wandered around the bedroom, getting reacquainted with my belongings. Hello, dresser. Hello, jewelry box. Hello, closet.

  Hello, brown suede hobo bag that Logan had thrown up on. The same brown suede hobo bag that I’d had with me the day I jumped out of Jennie Mae Tome’s window.

  In the middle of everything else that had happened since that day, I had forgotten all about that bag. If I didn’t do something about the spot on the suede, the smell would never go away.

  I opened the bag and pulled out my navy blue fringed shawl. Under it was a silk scarf and a round object wrapped in several layers of antiqued white tissue. I must have picked it up when I grabbed my clothes. The object was light. I picked it up and unwrapped the tissue, layer after layer after layer. Before I’d finished unwrapping it, I knew what it was. The blood flow to my appendages slowed, leaving my arms and legs tingly and numb. I set the object down and went to the kitchen to find Loncar.

  “I thought I told you I needed privacy,” he said.

  “I thought you should know I just found a skull in my bedroom.”

  I don’t remember a whole lot after that.

  Chapter 19

  SUNDAY, EARLY EVENING

  According to the medical examiner who stood next to the four policemen who showed up after Loncar revived me and called his precinct—possibly not in that order—the skull had been wrapped up for a long time. And if I hadn’t grabbed it when I went out the window, it might still be there. For all we knew, it might never have been found.

  I’d been operating under the belief that the theft was about the clothes. But what if it wasn’t? The skull must have been in the attic all along. Maybe that’s what Pritchard had been talking about when I overheard him approaching the attic.

  Now I had a whole new hobo bag of theories. Jennie Mae told me that her husband had left her. But what if he hadn’t had the chance to leave her because he was dead? She could have murdered him and hid the body. I shivered with the thought and shook my hands as if they’d come into contact with a decomposing corpse. Or what about Mr. Charles? Maybe the skull was his dirty little secret and Jennie Mae’s closet was the perfect place to keep it from becoming discovered?

  Loncar oversaw the transportation of the skull down the stairs, into the back of an ambulance. I did not point out that the skull was already dead. Seemed the least I could do.

  “Do you want to hear my theories?” I asked Loncar.

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  “Fine. But when you’re not paying attention, I’m going to raid the liquor cabinet and make out with boys!” I said.

  “What?”

  “Sorry. I think I had a flashback to high school.”

  “God bless your parents.”

  He went into the kitchen and I followed him. “So, now that we know what’s going on, it’s okay for me to sleep here, right?”

  “We don’t know what’s going on, and no, it’s not okay for you to sleep here.�
�

  “Come on, it’s obvious. Somebody has been looking for the skull.”

  He crossed his arms. “Then why go to the trouble of stealing the entirety of her collection? Why provide evidence of a crime instead of working under the cover of magazine editor? Why allow the skull to reside in her attic for forty years? Why come looking for it now?”

  “You don’t think we know what’s going on.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Okay, fine. Where am I supposed to go?”

  “About that. I made arrangements.”

  “This is my house. I pay to live here. It should be safe now that you’re here. You’re the police, right? Do your job and keep me safe.”

  The dad/daughter dynamic was stressing me out, and from the look on Loncar’s face, he wanted this situation over more than I did.

  “I thought you’d like to know that we heard from Mr. Taylor this afternoon. Seems his poker game went late. He was on a winning streak so he wasn’t willing to leave.”

  “But Nick called his dad a whole bunch of times and he never answered.”

  “Said the tables were running hot and he didn’t want any distractions.”

  “So Nick’s dad is safe?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Did you talk to him? Or to Nick. Did you talk to Nick?”

  “I’m not a messaging service.”

  Loncar made it sound like it had all been a misunderstanding. Nick’s dad had been invited to Nick’s poker game, and he’d gone, probably because he and Nick had been getting on each other’s nerves. But Nick Senior stayed out later than expected because he was on a winning streak. What if someone had arranged the invitation, gotten him out of the house, manipulated the winnings, all to send a message to me? It sounded too self-involved to be true. But as soon as I staged the parking lot fight with Nick and made it clear that we were through, his dad called home with a reasonable explanation.

  I didn’t buy for a second that it had been a misunderstanding. Pritchard Smith was behind this. Just like he’d been behind everything all along. And I was the only one who saw through him.

  So why didn’t I feel good about things? Because Loncar still didn’t want to hear me out. He still didn’t believe me about Pritchard. All he wanted was for me to go away to some place where I couldn’t be involved. I bet his “arrangement” didn’t involve pretzels.

  “Get whatever you want to take with you for the night. Your ride is going to be here in five minutes.”

  “Let me guess. You’re having me picked up by an unmarked police car and taken to the county jail.”

  “You know something? That’s the first good idea you’ve had.”

  I went upstairs and packed a bag and then dug my passport out from under my assortment of fishnets. My Crystal Gayle hair kept getting tangled in the strap of my bag so I braided it quickly and then wound it around and around my scalp and secured it with a scarf, the tails hanging down the back. I put on a brown and orange floral tunic and brown flare bottom jeans. The jeans were too long, so I adjusted with a pair of platform shoes with wooden soles that I’d bought in the Nineties the first time Seventies style had threatened to make a comeback. One of my mentors had once shared this charming philosophy: Fashion comes around three times, and then you die. I hoped this current assignment wasn’t accelerating my schedule.

  Out front, a car honked. I looked out the window. A grey sedan sat in my driveway. Everything about it, from the four antennas on the back to the red and blue lights nestled under the front grill, said Police Car. I’d been right.

  I stuffed a few more things into my bag and went downstairs. Loncar stood by the front door. “You’re going to thank me for this, Ms. Kidd.”

  “Yeah, right. The laundry is overflowing. Detergent is under the sink. Washer and dryer are in the basement. Feel free to take care of that while you’re here.”

  I left the house and got into the back seat of the sedan. I recognized the officer in the passenger seat from the day I’d filled out the Citizen’s Police Academy application. “Officer Callahan,” I said. “Nice to see you again.” I looked at the second officer. “Hi, I’m Samantha Kidd.” I reached my hand over the back of the seat and he shook it.

  Callahan gave him a critical look and he shrugged. “What?” he said. “She’s being polite.”

  “This is silly, you know that, right? You don’t want to drive me around anymore than I want you to drive me around. There are actual criminals out there on the streets that need to be caught.”

  “We’re just following orders, ma’am,” said Callahan.

  “Don’t ‘ma’am’ me,” I said. I sank back into the back seat and crossed my arms.

  “Buckle up. It’s the law,” said the driver.

  I straightened up and fastened the seatbelt. He backed the car out of the driveway and headed the opposite direction of the highway. We got up the hill, past the street where the Fourth of July parade took place each year, toward the defunct Ribbon Railroad train tracks. A dark blue car sat by the train tracks, blocking our way. “What’s he doing?” I asked. “Honk your horn.”

  “Looks like car trouble,” Callahan said. He put the car in park and got out. The officer in the passenger seat got out too. They approached the blue car.

  This didn’t seem right. We were on an empty road with no other people in sight. No way was this the way things were supposed to go down. I felt around inside my bag from the spy store until my fingers closed around the canister of pepper spray. I unbuckled my seatbelt and got out of the car. “Hey,” I yelled,” What’s going on?”

  The officers got into the blue sedan. It pulled past me and drove off. I’d been so intent on watching the cops get into the car and drive off that I hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t alone.

  A tall man in a plaid shirt, jeans, mirrored sunglasses and a Duck Dynasty amount of facial hair came out of the woods. He grabbed me. He threw me into the back seat of the unmarked police car, jumped into the front, and peeled out.

  Chapter 20

  SUNDAY, SIX-ISH

  I landed face down on the bag from the spy store. As the car accelerated, I unsheathed the pepper spray and aimed it at the side of his face. The spray stung my hands, and I squeezed my own eyes shut.

  The driver screamed. The car swerved as he reached up to cover his eyes. “Damn it, Kidd!”

  Nick?

  He pulled off the aviators and tossed them to the floor. I reached for the steering wheel from the back. We were the only car on the road. Whatever orders the two officers had been given, they didn’t include sticking around after the car swap had taken place. I didn’t have time to think about what had just taken place. The only thing on my mind was making sure we didn’t crash.

  The car swerved from one side of the road to the other. I did what I could to even it out, but we were going too fast for me to be steering from the back seat. About a quarter mile later, we hit a slight incline and the car slowed considerably. I yanked the steering wheel to the side and we eventually came to a stop thanks to the interference of a cornfield. Nick grabbed a bottle of water from the center console, tipped his head back, and poured the water on his face. Water splashed onto me. I dropped back into the back seat and waited for him to say something. The silence was interminable.

  Tentatively, I spoke. “Are you okay?”

  He wiped his eyes. “You sprayed me with pepper spray. Since when do you go around with cans of pepper spray?”

  “Since this morning. I didn’t know it was you. Since when do you have a beard and mustache?”

  “Since this afternoon.” He peeled the beard off and scratched his chin. “It’s a lot itchier than I expected.” He set the beard on the seat next to him, but left the mustache and sideburns on.

  “Do you want to tell me what just happened?” I asked.

  “I called Loncar after I heard from my dad. He asked about you and I told him about our fight.” He went silent. I knew he was thinking about what we’d said to ea
ch other. “You staged that fight, didn’t you? You did it make sure whoever had my dad saw that you and I weren’t together.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “Come up here,” he said quietly.

  I didn’t climb over the seat. I got out of the back and moved to the passenger side. As soon as I sat down, he reached out for me and slid me across the seat. He took my face in his hands and crushed my lips with a hot, wet, open mouth kiss that erased anything he’d said earlier that day. His lips were soft and gentle and if it wasn’t for the prickly fake mustache and the residue from the pepper spray, the kiss would have been perfect. I put my arms around his neck and twisted my torso until I was pressed up against him. I would have straddled him if the steering wheel wasn’t in the way. My heart raced and the adrenaline that I’d felt since the car hand-off kicked back into gear. I was going to have to find an outlet for all of this pent up energy.

  “I’m not going to lecture you about the kind of decisions you make ever again,” he whispered. “That’s a promise.”

  “I don’t want you to make promises that you can’t keep.”

  “Kidd, you and my dad are the two most important people in my life. What you did brought him back to me.”

  “Loncar doesn’t think the two things are related,” I said.

  “Loncar has been known to be wrong in the past.”

  If Nick had suggested that we curl up in the Crown Victoria in the middle of the corn field and spend the night there, I would have said yes. At that moment, him acknowledging all of the times that Loncar and I had gone head to head, when Nick had suggested that I leave things to the police, when my own interactions had led to captured criminals, I would have done just about anything to preserve the moment.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  Or, there was always Plan B.

  He put the car in reverse. I buckled into the seatbelt in the middle of the front seat and rested my head against his shoulder. He backed through the cornfield until we found the road, and then turned around and headed back the way we’d came. I didn’t know where he was taking me and I didn’t care. For whatever reason, being with Nick felt safe (even if he was dressed a little bit like Paul Bunyan) (or maybe that’s why). If it was all an illusion, I didn’t want to find out.